Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University

Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University belongs under Tirur, one of the practical travel bases in Malappuram district. Use Tirur for stays, food, local transport and operators, then plan this place as a focused stop rather than an isolated pin.

The story of Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University

The teaching is postgraduate and the subject list is wider than the name suggests. Alongside Malayalam literature and linguistics there are master's programmes in journalism and mass communication, creative writing, cultural heritage studies, environment studies, development studies and local development, history, sociology and film studies. Research degrees run across most of the same ground, with comparative literature added.

There is a second tier of shorter diplomas that reads like a list of jobs: new media, writing and presenting for television, advertising and copywriting, heritage tourism, script writing and videography, and project preparation and evaluation. For a university founded to defend a language, a striking amount of what it teaches is how to work in one.

The harder half of the project is vocabulary. Teaching science and social science through Malayalam means the words have to exist, and a good deal of the university's effort goes into making them. The Ezhuthachan Padana Kendram is compiling a lexicon of the poet the place is named for; an online Malayalam dictionary is in progress; there is a language technology centre, a heritage survey and a linguistic survey museum project.

The reach is not only local. The university established a Hermann Gundert Chair at the University of Tübingen in Germany — Gundert being the missionary whose Malayalam–English dictionary of 1872 remains the foundation of Malayalam lexicography, and whose papers are held at Tübingen. A university at Vakkad endowing a chair in Swabia to sit next to its own language's archive is not the ordinary behaviour of a small regional institution.

Kerala has a particular reason to take the question seriously. The state's own literacy is near-total and its public life is conducted in Malayalam, but its higher education has run in English for as long as it has existed, so a student who thinks in Malayalam has had to change languages at exactly the point where the thinking gets hard. The university's answer is not to translate textbooks; it is to build the terminology and then teach in it, which is slower and is the reason a dictionary project sits at the centre of a teaching institution.

The subject list follows from that rather than from tradition. Putting film studies, development studies and environmental science into a Malayalam-medium syllabus is a deliberate choice of the fields where the vocabulary gap is widest — nobody doubts that Malayalam can carry a discussion of Malayalam literature. The diplomas in television writing, copywriting and videography come from the other end of the same argument: the language has to be employable, not only teachable.

There is a heritage museum on the campus at Vakkad. Its opening hours are not published, and it is a university facility rather than a public one, so anyone making the trip specifically for it should ring the university first on 0494 2631230 rather than turn up.

The motto is Shreshtam Malayalam. It sits oddly with the fact that almost everything written about the university in the wider world is written in English, which is more or less the problem it was founded to work on.

Legend & myth

The idea of a university for the language is older than the institution and had been argued for in Kerala for decades before it existed, usually against the objection that a language does not need a university of its own. The counter-argument, and the one that won, was that a language which cannot carry a science syllabus eventually stops being used for serious work — and that this is a decision a state makes rather than a fate a language suffers.

That Tirur was chosen is not sentimental. Thunchath Ezhuthachan settled the alphabet Malayalam still uses on ground five kilometres east of this campus, and the Kerala school of astronomy wrote in these villages — including Jyeshthadeva's Yuktibhasa, composed in plain Malayalam rather than Sanskrit around 1530, four hundred and eighty years before anyone drafted an ordinance about teaching in it. The university is a late instalment of an old local habit.